The good news….then the bad news

Last week I I attended the Emerging Markets Homeownership Initiative (EMHI) conference. EMHI was started close to a decade ago with the focus of eliminating the disparity between white homeowners and households of color homeowners http://www.hocmn.org/en/emhi.cfm. When started, EMHI had dedicated staff and funding to work on strategies to eliminate this racial disparity in MN. The housing market changed, lending tightened, and the economy weakened. With this, EMHI was scaled back and became a program of the MN Home Ownership Center (HOC). I’m thankful for the HOC bringing continued attention to the disparities, but as a program (versus a stand alone initiative) it has lost much of its influence in the community.

Now for the good news: MN is the state with the highest homeowenership rate in the nation!

And the bad news: MN is also the state with the greatest disparity between white homeowners and community of color homeowners.

There really isn’t much more to post on this one at this time. We need to do better in this state to improve opportunities for responsible, sustainable, affordable homeownership.